DISRAELI 61

to depart without settling his accounts cut him to the heart,
expressed the hope that Evans was doing well in the world, and
that he would see him at Bradenham some day.

There is no record that this letter produced any result, but
the second, to Murray, hoping to submit a manuscript on the
writer's return from the East, led to a renewal of business
associations in the future.

Having made his peace all round so far as circumstances
permitted Disraeli sailed from London with Meredith for
Gibraltar, Once again begins the stream of letters to Isaac at
Bradenham, still written from all appearances with one eye on
posterity.

At Gibraltar the Garrison Library has the good taste to include
all Isaac's works. The Governor, a very fine old gentleman of
the Windsor Terrace school, asked the travellers to dinner.
Evidently in those days the lot of governors and other officials
in outposts of the Empire was much the same as it is to-day,
namely, to dispense official hospitality at the official residence to
passing strangers, using a nice discretion, aided by the tact of
AD.C.'s, as to who came within the social pale and who
remained outside it,

Disraeli complains about his health, but spends eight hours a
day on horseback. Momentous news is that the officers wear no
waistcoats in the morning. Since notoriety must be gained
somehow he attains it by carrying two different canes, one for
the morning and one for the evening. He changes them at
gun-fire, to the astonishment of the garrison.

At this date Mary Anne was still ignorant of his existence,
except that she may have read Ffoian Grey, though it might not
have appealed to her sophisticated taste because Mary Anne at
the time knew high life from the inside and had no need to read
about it described from the outside in a high-life novel by young
Mr. Disraeli who, as his father remarked, knew nothing of
dukes. Wyndham Lewis still sat for Aldeburgh, so soon—for
it was now the year 1830—to be extinguished both geographic-
ally and legislatively, and Mary Anne displayed her charm, her
tact and her beauty at parties she gave at his house in Grosvenor
Place, She was now thirty-eight, Wyndham Lewis was fifty,
and Disraeli twenty-six.

Directly he began his travels the word sublime cropped up
again in his correspondence, applied this time to the Straits of
Gibraltar. The Governor's wife, though verjr old, is very
agreeable* Probably she never saw anything quite so amusing